


certainly, a real world of its own

by enmity



Category: Persona 2, Persona Series
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-08 23:58:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11657379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: All she sees is Lisa.





	certainly, a real world of its own

**Author's Note:**

> i couldn't do [this](https://youtube.com/watch?v=__ELwsIL1gE) justice

It isn’t the first time she’s heard people talk about Lisa, but it is the first time she’s heard the name spoken like that, a hushed secret. Malice and a juvenile sort of disdain underline the syllables, spoken with strangely more poison than the fascinating and detachedly lurid details which follow in the same breath.

(These details will burrow their way into her mind later, more thoroughly, when she’s in the solitary company of her room’s ceiling and hindsight has started to take its usual liberty with the unwritten contents of her mind. For now, she is unassuming, her interest cursory; she notices nothing amiss.)   

Normally Chikalin would take an aside to regret the inopportune lack of pen and notebook at her disposal – she’s off duty at present, teeth working their way into the pleasantly sticky center of a jelly-jam bun – but considering the subject, she wonders if it’d be better to just listen, and trust her brain to commit the conversation to memory. It isn’t enough to deter her, in any case.

The girls’ voices take on an anonymous quality, barely audible in the midst of less interesting lunchroom banter, but Chikalin measures herself an above-average eavesdropper. She wouldn’t have gotten this far otherwise, after all. She comes to that thrillingly flattering conclusion as she swallows the last mouthful of bread and folds her arms into a serene position on the plastic table: her listening stance, as she’s taken to calling it. Her  _go on, spill it_  pose. The taste of strawberry lingers, acridly sweet, on the roof of her mouth.

She’s about to reach for the milk box, ready to wash it down, when one of the sophomores says, her head bowed low, “I saw her.”

The other two lean in closer, a huddle of whispers and unheard secrets. Chikalin does the same. Eavesdropping is a simple matter, but stealth is another, and her nails drag across the table surface as she strains to listen in without being noticed. A chill runs, sudden and biting, underneath the collar of her uniform; her teeth press, hard, against the taut line of her bottom lip without meaning to.   

“I didn’t get a good look – ”

“ – forty at least, I’d say – ”

“They were holding hands – ”

“She was always suspicious,” the short-haired one finishes, a sagely look on her face as she sighs, a customary shallow sound. She picks at her vegetables with a fork and says, quieter this time, “I wonder how her parents must feel.”

“Do you think they know?” comes the inevitable question, though Chikalin can’t tell who says it.

Another one wrinkles her nose. “To think that –” she pauses, her expression souring with performative repugnance. “That she was off doing something like  _that_.”

The first girl shakes her head, the ends of her pig-tails bobbing. “She was smiling,” she remarks, hands idly framing the curve of her chin. And then she throws them open, making a face and grabbing her emptied plate at the same time. “Let’s just not talk about it anymore. Thinking about it makes me sick.”

The three agree, and the conversation steers course away from troubled waters and onto safer territory, swiftly, like it’s the easiest thing the world. Soon they’re no longer whispering but laughing, earnestly and without care, the grotesque subject of a blonde girl pushed aside like carrots on a plate, and later, much later, in the quiet dim privacy of her room, Chikalin will find herself trying to do the same.

 

 

But, she can’t.

On her desk her notebook lies undisturbed, sprawled and open on empty pages. This girl is not the one Chikalin knows – her brittle smile and demure eyes are a far cry from her flesh-and-blood counterpart existing in reality, removed from the idealistic context of daydreams and hypothetical equations – but neither is she a stranger. That’s the worst part of it, Chikalin decides. Her fingers clench around the pink of her sheets as she turns her back to the other side of the bed; turns her back to flaxen hair falling loose around the false girl’s bare shoulders, a lighter color under the slant of moonlight filtering in, her blue gaze softening like haze in the glow.

Chikalin’s own eyes are turned to the window, searching the stretching sky for something like clarity, something just as intangible to lean against; but all it offers her is a crescent-shaped grin, languid and mocking, and if there’s any deeper meaning to be found in all of this then she can’t see it. She can’t, can’t, can’t. No matter how she tries.

All she sees is Lisa.

 _I saw her. I saw her smile_ – she thinks. The words assemble themselves over and over in her head, a fractured, colorless puzzle, unforgotten.

She never writes it down, in the end.

 

 

She doesn’t count on herself to forget, though.

 

 

“Lisa,” she hears herself calling out, days later. It’s a Friday. The courtyard outside the deserted shoe racks is blanketed with rain, late spring, falling so cool and light it’s almost mist. It feels like everything Chikalin isn’t, but the girl’s name is spilling out her mouth before she can help it, and when Lisa turns around on the heel of her sensible school shoes in a gracefully perfected swivel, an impersonal smile already spread across her face, Chikalin has no choice but to return the gesture. She wonders if it looks anything like the one that girl claimed to have seen or if it’s a completely different beast, something glossy and with teeth bared wide, deceptively inviting. The imagery lances her with needlepoint precision and she wonders. “Senpai,” she tacks on, her voice traitorously brittle.

The hem of her skirt catches itself in the passing breeze and lifts, imperceptibly slight. A faint look of familiarity flashes across Lisa’s eyes, and then she exhales, sounding almost relieved. Oh.

“Oh – it’s just you, Chikalin. What’s up?”

Her gaze snaps up in an instant. The borrowed textbook she’d meant to return to the library before closing time grows heavier in her hand. She thinks of decimals and percentages and the space between skirt and knees. The gap between her and Lisa: unsurpassable, insurmountable, all two steps and three centimeters worth. She counted.

“Nothing,” Chikalin says. Her face, a careful veil of platitude, neither falls nor falters. She casts aside her gaze, momentary, to the empty courtyard. The rain falls like a curtain of water over concrete and stone and the bowing pink petals of azaleas planted in the summer of last year, shying away from the darkened clouds. “The rain doesn’t seem to be letting up, huh?”

Lisa’s eyes follow hers. “It’s just a drizzle, though. I’m sure it’ll stop soon. Why, didn’t you bring an umbrella?”

“No.” The single-syllable lie tumbles out involuntarily, irrationally, but with surprising ease. Her expression corroborates, shifting into hollow self-pity without trying. “I forgot it at home.”

“ _Hoh lin_ ,” says Lisa. She stretches out her hand towards the doors, her small palm opened as though testing imaginary raindrops for intensity, and just as quickly she retracts it, letting it fall to her side. “Maybe you should wait; it doesn’t seem that bad today. Are you going to Peace Diner again?”

She shakes her head. This time the _no_ , though unsaid, is truthful.

“Chikalin’s not feeling well today,” she explains, and that part is true as well. She turns to her. “Might be a cold. What about you? Going somewhere in this weather?”

“Yeah,” Lisa answers, her tone unreadable as she meets her gaze. Easy. “I can’t miss it.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Club Zodiac?”

“Hm.”

“The library’s closing soon,” Chikalin says. “I really have to return this book on time. I’ll see you around, okay?”

“I should get going too.” The other girl pulls at the strap of her bag, idly readjusting it over her shoulder. Her other hand grips at the handle of a yellow umbrella. “See you, I guess.”

Lisa’s footsteps fade quickly, blending seamless into the rain. Chikalin stands, unmoving, her right hand gripping at the hem of her skirt and her eyes still set at the place on the white floor where Lisa had stood. She stays that way for ten, twenty seconds, and when she hears the hard thud of the book cover hitting the tiles, the sound heavy and harsh in her ears, all she does is close her eyes and try her best to replay it in her head, against the rain and the rumble of the train bound home, and when she walks upstairs to her room after dinner that night she doesn’t bury herself underneath the blankets, doesn’t think of Lisa or her smile or how they’d said her name then, a hushed secret, over white noise and plates of half-finished vegetables. No.

She doesn’t think of anything at all.

The floor is cold beneath her bare feet. Chikalin reaches over to shut the window, to flip the light-switch down. Her sheets are warm and her blanket is thick, but the cloak of darkness is no comfort at all, and when Lisa’s apparition looks at her accusingly she simply closes her eyes, evasive, a sign of relent. She simply gives up.

 

 

This is how it happens:

Chikalin stands a step outside the smiling red-and-white exterior of the convenience store at Yumezaki, an overflowing bag of groceries and colorfully-packaged snacks from a last-minute errand hanging from one arm. She is fifteen. The summer sky above is stretching, dimming into a paler color, and if she hurries, the sun won’t have set by the time she’s home.

She’s already turning to walk away when a flash of tied-up blonde hair seizes her attention. Her teal braids whip behind her head as she tilts her gaze towards the girl standing by the automatic doors, distinguished from the crowd by her hair and skin and eyes.

The girl fades into view in a few seconds, minutely and not all at once. She catches the long pale lines of her legs, the bangs falling flaxen and loose around her face, the bright red sweep of her skirt. It matches the color of her nails, vivid and vicarious; her fingers are lithe and delicate from afar, curled like ivy around the anonymous man’s sleeve, the muted blue fabric, and when the realization washes over her, a bucket of gelid water, Chikalin feels her eyes widen, entire body practically tense with alarm and something like –

Bile, she decides a second later, forcing it back down.

In the back of her mind an image of herself in this very moment surfaces, the scorching air seared by the sound of her own voice, high and desperate and loud with the poured-out contents of her heart. The imaginary Chikalin screams and cries and burns her throat with desperation but the real Lisa hears nothing, sees nothing: merely she smiles, a languid and secretive upturn of her mouth as her head tilts up towards his, so casually, an effortless act.

She does not hear. Instead she walks away, footsteps slow in tandem with his, her delicate back fading behind people and lights and the whirring mechanical sound of glass doors, closing. Inside the bag, a cup of ice cream sits forgotten, melting sticky and wet into a puddle. Chikalin does not look away for a very long time, even as the sky above her starts to bleed, slowly, into red. In the darkness Lisa’s smile is a tiny, lovely thing, a flash of what she knows she will never see again. At least, she thinks, not like that. Nothing like that.

She lets the thought burn – red-hot like a pyre in her mind, her eyes, the acrid pit of her stomach where it’s settled – and then she turns on her heel, taking one step after another. The dust kicks up from beneath her feet, and her steps drum a quiet rhythm echoing in her ears, all through the way home.

 

 

It’s a cool night. Her room is dark, the curtains are drawn, and Chikalin’s hands are closed, pressed to her chest as she pulls her legs close under the covers. The moon doesn’t smile at her this time, and when she closes her eyes she truly, truly thinks of nothing at all.

 

 

Her cheeks are dry when she wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay now that I'm like, marginally more awake I gotta say that this probably didn't happen in my other fanfic lol so this is basically an AU of an AU but if there's a part 2 for this I still think it'll have a happy ending.


End file.
